Your tweets may go out with no algorithm to decide who sees what, but unless your followers are online 24/7, poised over their smart phone, they will miss the vast majority of them. And the analytics prove it.

The current rule of thumb is that a tweet has a life of about 30 minutes (unless you're in someone's list, and that's a whole other topic). By comparison a Facebook post is supposed to have a life of more like 3 hours, though I have to say on many of my business pages it's more like 3 days.

And those who do see your tweet? Well, they kinda don't read them much. When you look at the analytics they can't be. Those links to erudite web stories that you're tweeting? Well, they're being RT'd without being read. At all.

How to set up Twitter analyticsCouldn't be easier. Log into your Twitter account. Directly into the Twitter account, not through Hootsuite or Tweetdeck or any other service. Then go to where the URL is written into your browser at the top of the screen and type in analytics.twitter.com and hit go. Don't open another tab. Type it right on top of that line that currently says twitter.com. And there it is. Your analytics. Don't panic that it's empty. It's not retrospective. It starts when you first dial into it. Send a few tweets and then come back tomorrow to see how you're going. Be prepared to be surprised.

What does Twitter analytics tell you?It lists your tweets and tells you how many impressions each got, how many engagements and what the engagement rate was. Impressions = how many people saw it. Engagements = how many people did anything with it. Engagement rate is a daft number because it's.:

engagementsimpressions

So if you have a few impressions and a lot of people RT'd it you'll get a high engagement rate. If you got lots of impressions and only a small number RT'd it you'd have a low engagement rate. But that could be more actual individuals engaging with the second tweet than with the first. Personally, I ignore the engagement rate figure.

Why does this matter?Your marketing goal is to take people shopping to buy your book. You have limited time and limited money. So you need to know where to put your effort for the greatest return. Analytics is useful. It helps you work out things like what content gets the best engagement and what times of day/week to tweet for the best response. It helps you see if you are progressing. You may be getting more followers, but are they bothering with your tweets? What it also does is reveal how ephemeral the medium is. It's very much in the moment. That's not a bad thing. But it clearly shows how different it is to Facebook. - See more at: http://www.marketing4writers.net/#sthash.2X2V3wM6.dpuf